There are few more effective means of drumming up media attention for whatever you're selling than to say something controversial in public.

Tibor Fischer, whose fourth novel, Voyage To The End Of The Room, is published on the same day as Amis's Yellow Dog, is certainly shrewd enough to know that his column in the Telegraph earlier this month attacking Amis's novel with apparently unprovoked ferocity would get him talked about far more than any number of press releases for his own; he acknowledged as much in the piece: 'As a writer, I'm relieved that Amis has produced a novel unworthy of his talent. No one wants a masterpiece knocking around when your own book is looking for attention.'

In person, though large and somewhat ursine, he is milder-mannered than the vitriol of the column would suggest; as with many cerebral comedians and comic writers, he comes across as more serious and reserved than his work might lead to you expect. I ask if the Amis column was a calculated piece of publicity-seeking, and he shrugs this away.

'I hope I made clear that I wasn't attacking Amis personally, but I felt that this time someone had to blow the whistle. For the last 10 years I've found myself defending Amis against charges that he's lost it, and when I read [Yellow Dog] I felt somewhat cheated. Yes, if I hadn't had my book coming out maybe I wouldn't have bothered but I mentioned the book in the article because if I hadn't, people would have accused me of dishonesty.'

Honest criticism or not, only a writer supremely confident of his own position would have the nerve to launch such an assault on one as revered as Amis. Fischer described his disgust at the novel as akin to 'your favourite uncle being caught in a school playground, masturbating', which strikes me as the language of sensation-seeking rather than a much-needed critical assessment of a major writer's development. A week after Fischer's outburst, the Booker longlist was published. Yellow Dog was on it. Voyage was not.

Asked if in writing the column he had set himself up to be knocked down, he remains philosophical. 'Criticism is part of being in the marketplace. If you can't take a bit of criticism you shouldn't bother publishing a book. I don't take much notice of reviews now - obviously you'd like to have straight worship but you're never going to get that. Besides,' he goes on, 'most books reviews aren't very well-written. They tend to be more about the reviewer than the book.'

This might sound slightly disingenuous from the writer whose column on Amis both began and ended with three paragraphs about himself. But self-belief must have been the guiding force in Fischer's writing career; had it not been, he would probably still be working as a journalist. His first novel, Under The Frog, a comic tale of a basketball player in 1950s Hungary, was greeted by 58 rejection letters from publishers before it was finally taken on by a small independent publisher, Polygon. It was subsequently shortlisted for the 1993 Booker Prize and pitched Fischer on to the last Best Of Young British novelists list in the same year.

Having been rewarded with success after such tenacity, he could have chosen to please his readers with something in the same vein, but instead produced The Thought Gang, a difficult black comedy about a Cambridge philosopher who robs banks. His third novel, The Collector Collector, was narrated by an earthenware pot, which, in less skilled hands, could have been a disastrous conceit but in fact proved extremely funny.

In Voyage he sets himself a greater challenge; he is writing the first-person narrative of a young woman, Oceane, a former dancer and sex-show performer. 'One of the reasons why I don't write the same kind of book again and again is that I get bored very easily, so I like to make things interesting for myself,' he explains. 'The character appeared first as a woman and I thought it would be a new departure. I did show it to various women along the way and they all pointed out minor criticisms. I do listen to women a lot, so I hope I've done a reasonable job.'

The central joke of the novel is that it's largely concerned with travel although Oceane quite literally never leaves her flat. Financially independent, she has the means to order the world to come to her and to experience it vicariously, through technology and the stories and travels of those around her. It's also about modern versions of reality and human interaction, in part inspired by an increasing discontent with London on the author's part.

'It's the idea that if you didn't have to leave home, would you bother? But that's a reflection that for me, London has become a much more unpleasant place than it used to be. I don't think that's to do with any kind of recent climate of fear, it's just that nothing works. There are just too many rats in the rat cage now.'

I ask if he considers Voyage to be an optimistic novel, and he replies that this is for the reader to decide. 'I think there isn't a great deal of optimism left in writers of my generation,' he says. 'You see it in Dickens and Eliot, this notion that if people only had decent education and housing everything would be perfect, and that continued up until about the Seventies, the idea that things were gradually getting better. But there's a sense now that even if those things were solved, that wouldn't change the basic problems of human nature. Still, it's meant to be a novel, not a political tract.'

As a novel, its episodic, anecdotal structure won't please everyone, but within the various stories are some piercing aperçus on how we relate to one another and to ourselves. The Barcelona sex club where Oceane used to work creates a smart inversion of the usual rules of relationships: with sex relegated to the status of a paid chore, friendship and trust become the most valued commodities, for which the characters flirt, wheedle and seduce.

It's also frequently very funny. Oceane is an oddly nebulous character but some of the cameo parts are superb. Audley, the debt-collector she employs, offers some brilliantly vicious and legal schemes for exacting revenge on an offender. Several of the misfits congregated at the sex club meet with unfortunate and bathetic ends on the club's roof terrace (one, in Pythonesque fashion, is crushed by a falling cow). Another section concerns Audley's history as a volunteer in the Balkan conflict; again, Fischer achieves a fine balance between tragedy and absurdity.

Voyage was four years in the writing, partly because, ironically, Fischer spent a lot of time travelling as part of his research. Most of it ended up redundant as far as the book was concerned - a frog-hunting trip in Ecuador and a visit to the Soldiers of Fortune convention in Las Vegas sadly didn't make the final cut - but will furnish him with some good stories for future use, especially the one involving the knife-fighting lesson in Vegas. Since finishing the book he's decided to take a break from novel-writing, and has been working on a screenplay loosely based on an obscure eighteenth-century French poet. He's also considering abandoning the rat-cage for somewhere warmer.

It could be a wise move, in case a legion of Amis fans decides to turn nasty and seek vengeance. That knife-fighting might come in handy after all.